Novels about musicians: Pt 1
In recommending novels about musicians, I’ve chosen my own favourites. There will be gaps, and I hope in the next instalment to list others which other people people have told me about.
This week I’m going to write about three very different novels which have a classical musician as their main character. Grace Notes, the 1997 novel by Bernard MacLaverty, is about a young woman composer, Catherine Anne McKenna, who like the author was brought up in Northern Ireland but now lives in Scotland. Elizabeth Wulfstan, a lieder singer from Yorkshire, is the main focus of Reginald Hill’s detective novel On Beulah Height, and Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration belongs to the fantasy genre known as alternative history, and is about Hubert, a boy chorister.
I read Grace Notes when it was first published and very much enjoyed it. I was reminded of it when asking friends for recommendations for this piece, and was glad to get to know it again. Like MacLaverty’s other novels it is short, around 250 pages, but is by no means slight. Set over a period of 18 months it covers the birth of Catherine’s daughter, the break-up of her relationship with the child’s alcoholic father, the performance of a major symphonic composition and the funeral of her father. If I also add that for much of this period she suffers from depression, you may think this will be a grimmer read than anyone needs just now! Catherine, however, shows a good deal of dry humour – “Glasgow’s great” she tells a friend, “like Belfast without the killing.” An easy-flowing mix of narration and stream of consciousness establishes her character and leads us in flashbacks through the earlier events of her life.
The novel is in two parts. Part One is set during the January days when she returns to her hometown in County Derry for the funeral of her father, Brendan, a Catholic publican. She hasn’t been home for several years. She gave up practising her religion while studying in Glasgow, and her father had told her not to come back. Now she and her mother attempt a tentative reconciliation. Part Two begins eighteen months earlier with the birth of her daughter, and ends a few weeks before her father’s death, with the performance of her composition for orchestra, Vernicle.
What makes the novel extraordinarily good is its focus on Catherine as a composer. Through flashbacks we meet the key figures in her musical development. Her piano teacher, Miss Bingham, recognised her talent after a few lessons and has followed her progress since. When Catherine visits her after the funeral, she finds her very ill, and plays her five gentle piano pieces based on paintings of women by Vermeer. The painter, Miss Bingham says, “began by painting religious subjects. Then he turned to the ordinary – elevated it. Made saints of you, me and the likes of us.” Catherine’s work sometimes shows a tension between the religious and the secular but sometimes attempts to reconcile the two.
Her second mentor is Chinese composer Huang Xiao Gang who helps her to see the rhythms in breath and find “the notes between the notes – grace notes.” She and the other Belfast music students form a rapport with him, but it’s not all spiritual as they eventually take him home worse for wear from the Crown Bar.
Winning a travel fellowship at the end of her studies, Catherine chooses to go to Kiev, just opening up to visitors from the west. She meets composer, Anatoli Melnichuck, with whom she communicates through his wife, Olga’s, translations. Words are not needed when they attend a church service with sonorous choral singing, and where she hears ancient bells. “Tintinnabulations. She felt the bells ringing in the soles of her feet… in the bones of her head.” What is the role of churches in a secular society? And how can composers commemorate those who have died through bigotry? Melnichuck has discussed the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar with Shostakovitch. Catherine thinks of places of death in her own country. “It’s a litany: Cornmarket, Claudy, Teeban…”
Catherine hears rhythm first when she composes. At her first lesson, Miss Bingham said, “Clap your name,” and she claps out the syllables of her name, in the rhythm she would speak it. Why seven syllables, not six, the teacher asks. “My music name is my full name, Catherine Anne McKenna. Seven claps are better than six.” Later she hears her “magic” number of seven beats in the Kyrie she writes for the school choir in Islay.
Kee
Ree
Eh
Ell
Eh
Ee
Son
She split the school choir. “One choir sings a rhythm, which forms steps down which the voice of the other choir descend in a cascade.” It’s sung at the school concert. “It was so great when the sound made by human beings was as good as the music created in her head.” But telling her mother about composing a Mass almost brings their reconciliation to a halt. Catherine says the mass “is a great form, a great structure.” Her mother is furious and believes she is trivialising it. “How dare you, Catherine?”
Full-time composers don’t make much money and don’t have many opportunities to have large-scale pieces performed. Even small-scale pieces are lucky to get more than one performance. The intriguingly named “A Suite for Trumpenists and Tromboners” for school brass ensemble (inspired in part by Vivaldi’s school for female musicians) is one piece which has an extended life thanks to interest shown by a Radio 3 producer, who then commissions the piece for orchestra to be played in the Henry Wood Hall as part of a broadcast concert of contemporary music.
MacLaverty’s imagining of this piece of music and Catherine’s creative processes is what makes this novel such a revelation for anyone who loves music. We follow the work from its gestation just after Anna’s birth. “From nowhere a breathing rhythm came to her and three-note sequence. A moment later it became better, a five-note phrase. She picked up her biro pen and jotted down the phrase.” A promising start but ironically the piece designed to “celebrate the birth of her ordinary but exquisite girl-child” founders for a year in which she’s unable to write a note. The music in her head is grim folk songs about child murder. A university lecturer once told her class that there are only two types of songs for babies, lullabies and songs about infanticide. “ ‘Nae half measure,’ he said. ‘We’ll get ye quiet, one way or another.”
By the sea one day she heard “a gentle tremolo of strings of different tones” Then “a higher and lower octave building to a chord.” A “brass idea” develops to include bells. “She heard the music in the silence of her head.” She chooses “By the sea’s edge” as a working title, but she would like something less clumsy.
By chance she reads a book about pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela who wore a scallop in their hats. Every shrine in Europe had such a badge - a vernicle. “The word appealed to her- it had a good ring to it. Proof that you’d been there … At the bottom of the world. And come through it – just.” So Vernicle is the name of her orchestral work which is performed at the end of the novel. This section of the novel is a feat of imagination from MacLaverty, a stunning piece of writing both on the creative process and the experience of hearing a new and difficult piece of music for the first time. It also introduces a musically surprising but entirely appropriate musical instrument.
Elizabeth Wulfstan is a lieder singer. Originally from Yorkshire she’s come home to give a concert to celebrate to issue of her first CD, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, sung in her own English translation. She’s plain-spoken, and those who meet her are often so astonished by her bluntness and Yorkshire accent, that they believe she’s putting on an act. She’s a character in the fourteenth of Reginald Hill’s Dalzeil and Pascoe police procedurals, On Beulah Height, published in 1998. Near the beginning of Day Four: Songs for Dead Children, we read her (ie Hill’s) version. It’s a rhyming translation of Rückert’s rhyming text. Liberties are taken with some of the lines, which of course have relevance to her situation, and ultimately to the denouement of the novel. I know the novel well but for the first time, I followed this translation while listening to the songs and I think it works pretty well.
I’m a fan of Hill’s writing. His witty style, well-drawn characters and wide range of interests would grace any type of fiction. (Hill said that every morning, “I ask my wife whether I should write a Booker Prize- winning novel, or another best-selling crime book. We always come down on the side of the crime book.”)
It’s a book about lost children, murdered children and, in reference to Mahler and Rückert’s experience, about the life-threatening illness of Peter Pascoe’s daughter, Rosie. Some of these deaths happened many years ago, shortly before Dendale was flooded to make a reservoir and the villagers rehoused elsewhere. The sequence of events has had a profound effect on all of the villagers, especially those who lost a child, and also on Elizabeth. Her chance to develop as a singer happened as a consequence of these events. Now in a hot summer the reservoir has dried up. Some secrets may be revealed. But then another child goes missing.
I would recommend this novel, even to those who haven’t read any of the series. The TV version is good, but the novels are far better! It works well as a mystery, but the characterisation is what makes it, and the climax of the novel ties up in a satisfactory way the detective work, Pascoe’s personal grief, and the reasons for a young singer choosing the Mahler song cycle for her first recording.
***
Kingsley Amis’s 1976 novel The Alteration is less well known than it should be. It’s a bit of an oddity, a fantasy novel in the genre known as alternative history. If you’ve read Robert Harris’s Fatherland or his new novel The Second Sleep, or of course The Man in the High Castle, you will find much to enjoy here. Set in 1976 in an England where there has been no Reformation, Hubert Anvil is a boy chorister with the most beautiful voice anyone has ever heard. For a ten-year-old he also shows a precocious talent as a composer, and in early scenes, he works out some compositions in his head. These seem to be conventional classical pieces, however deftly composed, but in an interesting scene his composition teacher comments on his unusual use of an F natural in a piece in the G major - it’s a small sign that left to develop his music may venture into unexpected territory. But the voice is what others seek to preserve. It can be done, with a simple operation. But to be effective the “alteration” must happen soon.
Amis’s Catholic England is imagined in great detail. (Once you've read the novel it’s worth consulting the Wikipedia entry where you’ll find explanations for more references than you’ve worked out for yourself!) It begins with the funeral of King Stephen III in Wren’s great basilica in Coverley, with its vast Turner ceiling, its west window by Gainsborough, and “one of its latest additions, an Ecce Homo mosaic by David Hockney.” Hubert sings the solo in “Mozart’s Second Requiem (K878), the crown of his middle age”. The story behind the work was that “it had been written out of its composer’s grief at the untimely death of a beloved younger contemporary.” There is much entertainment to be had from the musical references alone.
What emerges is, in a way, a parable about freedom. The forces of convention and restraint as typified by Catholic Europe, where all railways lead to Rome (cars and aeroplanes are not in use – they have been invented, but the Catholic world’s fear of the power of science means that they are not used). New England is popularly regarded as a land of heretic ‘Schismatics’(ie Protestants), where many people retain the uncouth habits of the native ‘savages’. When Hubert meets the New England Ambassador and his family, including his charming daughter, about his own age, his classmates ask if she looks pretty in buckskin and if her father chews tobacco. In fact, Van der Haag is cultivated and urbane and is puzzled by the hidebound traditions in England, such as the boarding school for choristers which Hubert attends.
Hubert’s headteacher, his father, and eventually Pope John XXIV himself (who can this genial but politically astute Yorkshire Pontiff be based on?) use various tactics to persuade him to have the operation. But his mother, her chaplain, his brother Antony, and his school friend Decuman, make him see another way ahead. His encounters with two elderly “altered” singers, stout and rouged, may be what proves decisive.
It’s a short novel, and tells its story sympathetically, believably and eventually surprisingly. Re-issued in Vintage Classics, new and second-hand copies are easily available.
Next time I’ll write about Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music and some other novels which are less well known.
